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We all want to look better. The problem is just how to go about doing so. After all, unless you’re willing to undergo expensive, painful surgery, you’re going to have to work with the facial features you’re born with.

Also, a willingness to spend the next six months looking like you’re Claude Raines.

The problem, of course, is that this also costs money. But that’s where I come in. If you know what you’re doing, it’s possible to completely change your look without busting your budget in the process.

Clothes are an important part of one’s identity. They serve as an outward expression of your innermost self. Want to tell people who you are? Dress appropriately.

This, for example, tells people about you’re a member of Sergeant Pepper’s Nuclear Wasteland Band

But if you want to stand out in a way that gets you attention that you want? Then you want to develop your sense of style.

The difference between fashion and style is that fashion changes. It follows trends and everyone else follows two or three steps behind it, trying to come up with their own version. This is how you end up with silkscreened t-shirts with rivets and overly-embroidered jeans and embarrassing photos you’ll never be able to fully erase from social media.

Style, on the other hand, is personal. Sometimes it aligns with trends, other times it stands athwart them but it’s always uniquely yours. But if you know only clothes as “that which keeps my pasty meatsack covered in social situations,” style can feel as eldritch and unknowable as the Elder Gods. So how do you develop your own sense of style?

I’m a 26 year old bisexual lady and I have this friend (who I’ll call ‘Friend’) who I’ve been hanging out with for about a year and have gotten pretty close to. I always thought Friend was really beautiful but I had immediately filed her under “Attractive but married – look elsewhere for sexytimes”. Even though she flirts with me quite a lot, I always saw this as Friend being Friend and left it at that.

However, during our girls’ nights with one or two of our other friends she’s been talking about how she and her husband have been meaning to try a threesome. Her husband, who I’ve also spent a lot of time with is both incredibly gorgeous and is a generally awesome person.

So how the hell do I let them know I want in?

To me it seems like normal flirting might be ill-advised lest one or both of them take me as a potential usurper instead of as someone who has no interest in busting up an awesome couple and just wants to have some fun. So what do I do? Send them a resume? Raise my hand and go “Ooh! Ooh! Me! Me!” next time she brings it up? Over coffee and muffins should I be like “Hey…..so about that threesome….”?

One of the most important things that you can do when you’re trying to improve your dating success is also one of the most simple: you want to smell better. Scent is one of the most under-appreciated aspects of attraction. Our sense of smell is incredibly powerful and affects us in ways that we’re often unaware of. Not only is it the sense most intimately connected to memory and recall, but many scientists theorize that scent actually can be a signal for genetic compatibility. More importantly however, scent also affects how people perceive us on an unconscious level. In a study conducted by Oxford University, women were asked to rate the attractiveness of men in various photos. Unbeknownst to the participants, each photo had been subtly scented with different fragrances – some pleasant and sweet-smelling, others more pungent. The results were conclusive; every unpleasant-smelling photo – smelling faintly of burning rubber or basic BO – was rated as being far less attractive.

Because nothing screams “sexy times” like cabbage and rotten cheese…

The photos that had more appealing scents – geraniums and men’s cologne – were consistently rated as being much more attractive.

Managing to smell better is an incredibly simple and surprisingly powerful tool in making yourself more attractive. But – as with most tools – you have to know how to use it properly.

To give a concrete example: Serge Gainsbourg was nobody’s idea of a male model, but he was attractive as all hell. For a man who looks like the love-child of Steve Buscemi and Droopy Dog, he got more famous ass than a drunk man with a stolen credit card at a celebrity donkey auction who then escaped by crashing through a plate-ass window.

Being French makes up for many, many sins.

Gainsbourg understood what it meant to be attractive. Good looks are purely physical attributes – in men, it’s a matter of facial symmetry, shoulder-to-waist ratio, height and outward signs of physical health. Attractiveness on the other hand, is about the mind, and how people respond to you. Being attractive is about charisma and the way you make people feel; in fact, a study from Webster University found that it was behavior that attracted people rather than just physical looks.

One of the most interesting things about being attractive is that it’s the little things that make up the difference – things that are easily overlooked, but powerful when utilized properly. Here are five subtle attributes you can use to make yourself much more attractive… instantly.